Books

Valerie Mannaerts makes drawings, graphic art and videos and she photographs. The many recurring themes in her work are travesty, trans-gender, bodily distortion, teenage phantasies and childish projections onto the seamy side of 'adult life' seem to question identity and the female in a penetrative way. This book is a collection of her drawings and is an invitation to the reader to color them. This book is a coloring book.

Reward Wanted encompassed three years of gathering lost dog leaflets posted in Mexico City. This collection of 104 documents added up in iddle times during which I traveled from one place to the next, or simply strolled aimlessly through different parts of the city. The result conveys a tragicomical network of personal and emotive messages, and also transpires a political and social plot. The kidnapping of people is still common in Mexico, this habitual practice derives in new modalities, such as the express abduction of dogs. (JH)

For the the exhibition in the S.M.A.K., Partenheimer's conceptual point of departure has been La Robe des Choses, a text from A la Rêveuse Matière by the French author Francis Ponge. Reality is veiled, elusive. There is only one-way to fathom its depths: through thinking. Reflection results in concepts that enable us to penetrate and reconstruct reality. On the other hand, there will always remain elements from reality that elude pure reason and that can only be made visible by art. Partenheimer's work must consequently be interpreted as resulting from a coherent stream of thoughts, with which the artist does not so much want to reveal or evoke a certain reality, as to show us and discuss the reflections that accompany our 'being in this reality'. Quite often dogmas are undermined by new dogmas. That, precisely, is what Partenheimer seeks to avoid. An image, in Partenheimer's view, is only interesting if it can constantly bring about new streams of ideas. The public is thus invited to create the image himself or herself according the artist's theory: 'All sculpture is essentially conceptual. It does not have a final, definite form or a fixed, spatial dimension. As a model, as a monument of the imagination, a sculpture assumes those dimensions, which it needs for the respective environment in which it is shown. Any work may be altered and its dimensions deliberately adapted to the place chosen for its showing, be it a geometrically architectural room or an open, natural space'.

All the aspects of 'attention' are a recurring theme in the art of Anne Daems. In her video work, photography and drawings, she shows how everyday life intertwines with the sublime and how – often without noticing – private and public issues get mixed up.

Looking for a photographic subject, Martien Van Beeck became fascinated by the many ways of preservation in a museum of zoology. Mounted skeletons, stuffed and dried animals and jars of specimens are the manifestations of a disruption of the natural process of living and dying. Van Beeck is interested in the decomposing and concomitant disruption of the symbolic dimensions of grief, mourning and rituals. His photographic work is not an attempt to give an opinion towards the scientific motives to preserve specimens, neither is it an attempt to systematically catalogue all the thousands of jars. The artist approaches every creature one by one and tries to capture a contorted posture, a dramatic gesture, a grotesque strangeness. Through these photographs van Beek also reflects upon his own death and the meaning of death in our society trough time.

For 14 nights, 7th 20th of April 2003, the artist sat in a soundproofed one-way mirrored glass room from 7 to 11 pm drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and speaking. His main focus were his undergraduate years (between 1990 and 1995) at the American University in Cairo (AUC), which he entered when he was 15 and graduated from when he was 20. All 56 hours of this performative action were documented on a digital video camera. The book holds a transcription of every legible word uttered during these hours.

Joris Ghekiere lives and works in Klein-Willebroek (Antwerp, Belgium) He participated in many exhibitions in galleries, museums and centres for contemporary art. The manipulation and reduction of the beauty of daily images and objects are charactaristic in many of his paintings. The enormous variety of images might errounously indicate a lack of 'red line'. Once again, the spectator may be mislead...

The first of this 2-volume edition holds a selection of notes, drawings, photographies, texts, progams and postcards that accompanied the creation of the Piezas distinguidas cycle. The second volume holds a series of essays by authors invited by Claire Rusier of the Centre de la Dance, Paris, to reflect on its complex set of languages, hugging the limits of our perception of dance, performance and visual art.

With small interventions Gert Robijns potters about the construction – that reality is after all – and forces our senses to re-construct the reception of our perception. His search for physical laws that challenge our cultural conventions, produced an impressive series of poetic work, of which this book is the first survey.